Arts Career Roundtable Event

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This event is now fully booked.

Melbourne Arts graduates enjoy challenging and rewarding careers in a diverse range of industries, both locally and abroad. Graduates find that studying a range of disciplines across their Arts degree equips them with flexible thinking skills and opens up an array of career opportunities.

For a subject as wide and varied as Arts sometimes it can be difficult to decide which direction you want your future career to take.

Employers look for many different skills and an Arts degree may well have equipped you with many of them, even though you may not realise it. What an Arts degree does demonstrate to a prospective employer is that you are interested in learning more and enhancing your skills in a wide range of disciplines.

Join us for Roundtable conversations with Arts alumni who represent a wide gamut of careers to get some direction on what could be available to you.

This evening will give you the opportunity to network with like-minded people, establish useful connections and help you to understand how much career opportunity is available after your Arts degree.

Working in 15 minute blocks you will be able to meet with a number of interesting and successful Arts alumni and be able to ask them directly about their career to date, the lessons they’ve learned, their achievements and challenges, and hear their advice about getting ahead in the earlier stages of your own professional journey.

We wouldn’t want you to miss this opportunity to glean valuable advice from fellow alumni and make useful connections to further your career, so as places are limited we’d advise getting in early.

List of speakers

Lindy Allen - BA (1992)
CEO, Regional Arts Victoria

Lindy has spent most of her working life in the creative industries in both a regional and metropolitan context. From a stage career in music and comedy in the late 70s and early 80s, she moved to roles in business and administration in the health and environment sectors. She relocated to Mallacoota in Far-East Gippsland in the early 1990s with her family in order to give her children a sense of the community responsibility that accompanies acceptance within a small, isolated and self-supporting village. Lindy is a great believer in maintaining cultural diversity through dialogue and respect. At a local level, communities function best when they are supported, through skills development and access to information and other resources, to make their own decisions. Her work has been grounded in the belief that there are three stages to the development of community awareness in humans: an early realisation of what is ‘mine’, the acceptance that some things are ‘yours and mine’ and the knowledge that the things worth striving for belong to the broader community. Lindy believes that working in community-based cultural organisations has been a privilege as it has given her the opportunity to contribute to a sector that is strongly focussed on improving what is ‘ours.’

Lindy was appointed to the role in April 2004. Prior to joining RAV she was awarded an Asialink Arts Management Residency and spent two months in Yogyakarta and travelling through Java and Bali, teaching arts management and researching the nature of community arts practise in an unfunded environment. As a result of this residency, she developed an Indonesian artist collaborative project with four regional Victorian festivals in Lakes Entrance, Shepparton, Sale and Horsham to work with architect and artist Eko Prawoto.

Lesley Alway graduated with a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts and BEd from the University of Melbourne, and an MBA from Monash University.

Lesley is an arts manager with experience in cultural organisations and special expertise in the visual arts in the government, non-profit and private sectors. Lesley is currently Director of Asialink Arts, based at the University of Melbourne. Between 2008-2010, Lesley was the Managing Director of Sotheby’s Australia. She had previously been Director / CEO of Heide Museum of Modern Art in Melbourne since 2003 where she oversaw the major redevelopment of the Museum which re-opened in July 2006. Between 1997 and 2000, Lesley was the Director of Arts Victoria where she managed the introduction of many new policy initiatives including projects for the major collecting institutions such as Museum Victoria, the National Gallery of Victoria and the State Library, new professional and artistic development opportunities for contemporary artists and arts organisations as well as a range of marketing initiatives directed at expanding local, international and tourism audiences.

Prior to joining Arts Victoria in 1995 as Manager, Industry Development, Research and Information, Lesley was Director of Artbank for four years. Artbank is a key Commonwealth Government organization for supporting contemporary Australian artists through purchasing their work and making it available for rental to both Australian and international clients. She has also worked for Sotheby’s Melbourne, in local government cultural management, arts education and has also been a consultant in business planning, and cultural policy to various interstate and federal arts based organisations. She has lectured in post-graduate cultural policy and management at both the University of Melbourne and Deakin University.

Lauren Bialkower graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1998 before returning to complete a Master of Marketing at Melbourne Business School in 2003.

After working extensively within the Melbourne Uni theatre scene, she secured a General Management residency with Playwrights Horizons, an off-broadway theatre company in New York. Since then, Lauren has worked with many of Australia’s leading arts organisations including the Victorian Arts Centre, Sydney Theatre Company, Melbourne Symphony and Melbourne Festival, where she led a team of 12 as Marketing and Communications Manager for four festivals.

Lauren is currently the Manager Arts and Culture for Glen Eira City Council and also sits on the Board of the Emerging Writers Festival.

Sue Cramer - BA(Hons) (1991)
Senior Curator, Heide Museum

Sue Cramer has a BA (Hons) in Fine Arts and History at the University of Melbourne.

Sue joined Heide Museum of Modern Art as Public Programs Co-ordinator in 2005 and in January 2009 took up the position of Curator. She has worked since the early 1980s as a curator and writer on contemporary art.

Sue began her career as a Curatorial Assistant at Heide Park and Art Gallery (as it was formerly known) from 1982–84. She was Exhibitions Co-ordinator/Curator and then Acting Director at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne (1985–87). For three years she was Director, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane (1987–89). In 1990 Sue was awarded a Professional Development Grant by the Australia Council enabling her to take up the one-year position of Visiting Curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. She subsequently joined the MCA as a Curator (from 1991–2001). In 1984, Sue was Art Critic for The Age newspaper in Melbourne. In addition to writing exhibition catalogues she has contributed several articles to international and Australian journals. In 2009 Sue co-curated with Lesley Harding Cubism and Australian Art at Heide. The exhibition was accompanied by a book co-authoured by Cramer and Harding published by Melbourne University Publishing in association with Heide. This was awarded equal Best Art History for 2009 by the Art Association of Australian and New Zealand. Sue is currently developing an exhibition and publication Less is More: Minimal and Post-Minimal Art in Australia to be presented at Heide later this year.

Diana Edwards
Careers Consultant, University of Melbourne

Diana Edwards is a Careers Consultant working in Careers & Employment at University of Melbourne. Diana specialises in providing careers services for Arts students and graduates in Arts-related graduate study programs.

She provides both 1:1 career consultations and runs a range of careers educational sessions on topics such as resume writing, career planning and job seeking.

Diana has worked at a number of Universities, in private practice and with an HR consultancy working with mature people in career transition.

Dr Richard Gillespie graduated with a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in 1978.

Richard trained as a historian and sociologist of science at the University of Melbourne and University of Pennsylvania. He taught history of science and medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, Deakin University and the University of Melbourne before joining Museum Victoria in 1990, where he is now joint Head of the History & Technology Department and Indigenous Cultures Department.

He has been a Fulbright Scholar, been awarded a Mellon Fellowship, Gordon Darling Fellowship, and received the Henry Schuman Prize of the History of Science Society (US). He is the author of The Great Melbourne Telescope (Museum Victoria, 2011) and Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments (Cambridge Univ Press, 1987), and a member of the editorial board of reCollections: a journal of museums and collections.

Steve worked as Associate Director of the Melbourne Writer’s Festival in both 2008 and 2009. Steve was curator of The Independent Type: Books & Writing in Victoria exhibition (held at the State Library of Victoria in 2009) and was general editor of the anthology Literary Melbourne (2009). He was, for ten years, co-host of 3RRR’s books and writing radio show Aural Text and co-editor of the Australian lit-mag Going Down Swinging. Steve has also been a freelance book editor, Program Director of the Victorian Writers Centre, Director of the Emerging Writers Festival and Artistic Director of Express Media.

Frances Lindsay - BA (1968)
Deputy Director of the National Gallery of Victoria

Frances Lindsay is one of Australia’s most experienced art museum professionals. She has been responsible for groundbreaking temporary exhibitions of both International and Australian artists and in her role at the NGV leads and oversees the display of the permanent collections of both Australian and International art, and the departments of curatorial, education and public programs, exhibition design, multimedia and publications. Prior to joining the NGV in 2000, she was Inaugural Director of The Ian Potter Museum of Art, The University of Melbourne.

Among her achievements she has been responsible for bringing two large, internationally acclaimed museum redevelopments to fruition, from initial design stages to opening, first with The Ian Potter Museum of Art and then at with The Ian Potter Centre: NGV Australia at Federation Square.

Dr Moya McFadzean is currently the Senior Curator of Migration in the History and Technology Department at Museum Victoria, a position she has held since 1995. Since 2006 she has continued to work on exhibition, website and collection developments, including Leaving Home (lead curator, Immigration Museum 2007), The Melbourne Story (co-curator, Melbourne Museum (2008) and Identity: yours mine ours (lead curator, Immigration Museum 2011). In 2009 Moya was awarded a PhD on a cultural history of glory boxes in mid 20th century Australia. Moya was Treasurer of the Museums Australia Historians National Network from 2004-07. She has delivered numerous conference papers in Australia, the UK, Sweden and Taiwan on the representation of migration histories in museums.

Odilla O'Boyle holds a Bachelor of Arts, a Diploma of Education and a Masters in Arts Management. Odilla is the Events Manager for Film Victoria.

After teaching English and Drama in Upper Yarra Victoria she spent several years overseas in Africa, the UK, Europe and South Africa. Returning full time to Australia in 2000 she has worked as General Manager at the Melbourne International Jazz Festival, Development Manager at the National Institute of Circus Arts and as an Event Coordinator for the City of Stonnington. Odilla has also recently begun studying for a Law degree.